Vaccine failure must not undermine public trust

Australia’s success in containing the spread of the COVID-19 virus affords the luxury of time to prepare for a safe and orderly rollout of a vaccine. The withdrawal of the University of Queensland trial vaccine is a blow to Australia’s research efforts and national pride, but not extraordinary given the difficulty of the task. Fortunately for Australia, the government has negotiated for supplies to be available from the developers of several different vaccines that have proven to be safe and that are now in production, so the failure of the UQ trial has not left the country stranded without the prospect of future cover. The bigger challenge posed by the failure of the UQ trial will be in maintaining public confidence in the vaccine strategy.

Successful rollout of a vaccine will be essential in restoring certainty to business and in restarting international travel. Without a vaccine, Australia’s health and economic outlook will be far less certain.

Scott Morrison rightly has gone on the front foot to argue that cancelling the UQ trial is a signal the safeguards are working, not the opposite. This is what safety trials are all about. Australian Medical Association vice-president Chris Moy says the public is witnessing the way that the trialling and safety checks of medications and immunisations happen.

The problem with the UQ vaccine stemmed from the use of the HIV protein in the molecular clamp to stabilise the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Some participants in phase one of the trial recorded false positive readings to HIV. Researchers assure that at no time were participants at risk of contracting HIV or harmed in any way. But failure of the UQ trial raises some questions as to whether warnings to government by a prominent Australian vaccine scientist that the use of the HIV protein in the UQ vaccine would present “big problems”. The warning by Adelaide vaccine scientist Nikolai Petrovsky came months before the federal government entered into a multi-million-dollar deal to buy 51 million doses of the protein-based candidate.

Federal Department of Health secretary Brendan Murphy says the potential problem was known and factored into the UQ trials but had become a bigger problem than anticipated. Medical efficacy aside, linking HIV with a COVID-19 vaccine has the makings of a public relations disaster. Once the vaccine trials revealed that participants could show false positive readings for HIV, UQ had no option but to abandon the vaccine quest. The government now must work overtime to reinforce the message that a vaccine, when it is rolled out, will be safe.

A vaccine strategy will be effective only if it is widely adopted. As public resistance to the COVIDSafe app has demonstrated, there is a vein of mistrust towards government mandate in the community. This must not be allowed to frustrate Australia’s vaccine rollout when it happens. Public education now will be an even more vital part of ensuring that the vaccine is widely embraced.

The Prime Minister says vaccine approval will not be rushed. He says Australia has one of the highest rates of vaccination in the world. “The reason for that is we take these issues incredibly seriously and we have the best people in the world making those decisions to protect the safety of Australians,” Mr Morrison said.

Fortunately, with the virus contained in Australia and rigorous measures in place to contact-trace outbreaks and to quarantine overseas visitors, the government is not under undue pressure to act quickly. The first step has been to secure an additional 20 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and an extra 11 million doses of the alternative vaccine developed by Novavax.

Vaccine treatments have been approved by health regulators in the US and Britain, where the rollout of vaccine programs has already begun.

There are still some questions about when exactly Australia’s vaccine program will begin. As things stand, the Therapeutic Goods Administration says it plans to approve a vaccine sometime in the new year. Given the approvals in Britain and the US, this should be a formality. As a result, Australian regulators will have the luxury of seeing the results of the rollout of millions of vaccines in other jurisdictions where the need is much greater. Compared with Australia’s low rates of infection and mortality, the pandemic is still out of control in many parts of the northern hemisphere, made more fraught by the onset of winter.

The COVID-19 vaccine program is a truly international effort. It is likely that access to travel and other community activities will be guided by whether a person has received a vaccine. Fortunately, failure of the UQ vaccine trial is not expected to unduly retard Australia’s progress in getting broad community cover. Vaccine maker CSL will immediately switch domestic production to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The government still expects there to be comprehensive vaccine cover in Australia by the fourth quarter of next year. The challenge is to not allow failure of the UQ trial to unnecessarily undermine public confidence in the safety of Australia’s vaccine program.